The answer to my question comes in the form of two books recently read: one, relatively new, by Terry Eagleton, the British literary critic with a great comic gift that makes THE GATE KEEPER sharp-witted, insightful, often hilarious; the other a classic in its genre, Vladimir Nabokov's SPEAK MEMORY, perhaps the greatest of autobiographies.
Eagleton has had the ability to use language as his main weapon in the British class system. With that skill, he has moved from an Irish-Catholic working class background to the elite world of academia while at the same time using this skill to satirize the Oxbridge scene. His portrait of his Cambridge don is memorable and hilarious yet also reverent since he, like the nuns the young Eagleton once served as a boy, opened doors to a wider world than he might have ever known. The resulting memoir is not merely about Eagleton but about several other things, too: Britain in the past fifty years, being a Catholic, and an outsider.
So, too, Nabokov's memoir is not only about his early life, in all its rich detail, but about time, memory, and the writing of autobiography itself. As he recalls his aristocratic upbringing in pre-revolutionary Russia, where he was taught English first, then Russian and French, where his household staff numbered fifty servants, he situates his detailed recollections in a broader context. He shows us how recording in words a remembered scene from boyhood is to see it in relation to time, which he says is "but memory in the making."
Like St. Augustine's Confessions, the first Western autobiography we know of, Nabokov is concerned with the relation between time, imagination, and memory. As a scientist (specializing in butterflies), he has an eye for specifics, and his details provide the vivid thrill he had that we the reader can share as we learn what made him what he is, a man with poetic gifts in several languages, whose baroque sentences convey an old-world aura. He tells us that his mother's ring is of "pigeon-blood ruby" (not merely ruby), thereby re-creating with such specifics the atmosphere of his privileged upbringing. He is grateful to his mother's memory of past details since, he says, he has inherited her taste for the beauty of "unreal estate," intangible associations that sustained him in later years in exile and relative poverty. Recalling these bits of past delights is important in maintaining happiness later, as the past informs the present.
Probing his childhood becomes, for Nabokov, an "awakening of consciousness" shared with our remote ancestors as they discovered time. "How small the cosmos," he writes, how puny "in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection and its expression in words."
The focus, then, is not just on various, discontinuous fragments recollected in the writing process, not just on his own personal life but on re-staging the past in the present and reflecting on our shared human sense of how time functions. He resists the wall of ordinary time that separates us from timelessness. We feel lucky to share in recollected days when time seemed to stand still.
And so, in "Speak, Memory," Nabokov has created a poetic text, rich in detail, that defines what it means to write about oneself, one's own life, in the context of the vast ocean of consciousness and the mystery of time. His book is both a remarkable memoir and a guide to exploring one's past and using language to say often inexpressible things. It is about how the personal can be universal.
It is a memoir about how, ideally, to write a memoir (if only one were as richly talented as he).
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Monday, June 22, 2020
Friday, September 1, 2017
How real is the past?
I visited my 96-year-old friend Mary last week. Although her bones are wobbly, she has lost none of her faculties. Her long-term memory is especially alive with stories of World War II and life on Long Island 60 years ago, and she comes alive in telling these stories. She finds joy in "re-living the past" without being trapped by guilt or needing to re-hash old grievances.
When she said, "the past is not over and done with," I thought of William Faulkner's famous statement: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
This seems to mean that the present is unreal, that "right now" is always becoming the past and so does not exist.
I will come back to that. After seeing Mary, I happened to find a cache of old family pictures and high school memorabilia; and before finding a new home for them, found myself being pulled back more than 50 years, thinking of friends as they were then and convincing myself, for a time, that they were as alive to me--and as real--as the images of long-gone actors on the screen, which deceive us into thinking they are still alive.
It almost like the delusion that doomed the tragic protagonist in The Great Gatsby, who was convinced he could repeat the past, that somehow he could recapture Daisy as she once was, as if the intervening years had not occurred, as if he could extend his remembered past happiness into the present. Poor Gatsby.
Someone said that the past is always a work in progress. I think of this often when I read biographies that re-visit familiar figures from the past and bring them "to life." What is happening, of course, is that the reader (like the historian) is re-interpreting through the imagination a new version of what the past might have been. Augustine, back in the 4th century, saw in his reflections on time in the Confessions, that memory and imagination are related, almost interchangeable.
All our experiences are filtered through remembered events as they become part of our past. In saying this, I am neglecting my spiritual conviction, often called mindfulness, that tells us that only the present moment is real. God, Ultimate Reality, is revealed to Moses as "I AM."
The contemplative mind, whether following Christian or Buddhist practice, pushes aside the past, which is as unreal as the future; in this way only the present moment, fleeting as it is, can give us access to the kind of timeless present found in meditation--and evoked by T. S. Eliot in his later poetry.
Many poets have sought those timeless moments "in and out of time" that hint at eternity, just as mystics try to find words for the inexpressible moments of union with the divine. Great poets are mystics in the sense that, for them, past events, recalled by the memory and enhanced by imagination, live on in the mind and in their art, which is impervious to time.
So I think that it is to great writers, especially poets, that we must turn for a proper response to Faulkner's idea of the past, which I think of as a work in progress; it often tries to snare us into thinking that it's real.
When she said, "the past is not over and done with," I thought of William Faulkner's famous statement: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
This seems to mean that the present is unreal, that "right now" is always becoming the past and so does not exist.
I will come back to that. After seeing Mary, I happened to find a cache of old family pictures and high school memorabilia; and before finding a new home for them, found myself being pulled back more than 50 years, thinking of friends as they were then and convincing myself, for a time, that they were as alive to me--and as real--as the images of long-gone actors on the screen, which deceive us into thinking they are still alive.
It almost like the delusion that doomed the tragic protagonist in The Great Gatsby, who was convinced he could repeat the past, that somehow he could recapture Daisy as she once was, as if the intervening years had not occurred, as if he could extend his remembered past happiness into the present. Poor Gatsby.
Someone said that the past is always a work in progress. I think of this often when I read biographies that re-visit familiar figures from the past and bring them "to life." What is happening, of course, is that the reader (like the historian) is re-interpreting through the imagination a new version of what the past might have been. Augustine, back in the 4th century, saw in his reflections on time in the Confessions, that memory and imagination are related, almost interchangeable.
All our experiences are filtered through remembered events as they become part of our past. In saying this, I am neglecting my spiritual conviction, often called mindfulness, that tells us that only the present moment is real. God, Ultimate Reality, is revealed to Moses as "I AM."
The contemplative mind, whether following Christian or Buddhist practice, pushes aside the past, which is as unreal as the future; in this way only the present moment, fleeting as it is, can give us access to the kind of timeless present found in meditation--and evoked by T. S. Eliot in his later poetry.
Many poets have sought those timeless moments "in and out of time" that hint at eternity, just as mystics try to find words for the inexpressible moments of union with the divine. Great poets are mystics in the sense that, for them, past events, recalled by the memory and enhanced by imagination, live on in the mind and in their art, which is impervious to time.
So I think that it is to great writers, especially poets, that we must turn for a proper response to Faulkner's idea of the past, which I think of as a work in progress; it often tries to snare us into thinking that it's real.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Time and the Writer
No one ever has enough time, it seems, especially writers. Yet having too much time in my literary experience is more of a problem than being forced to follow a set schedule. It's so easy to procrastinate if you have an entire summer free, with no deadlines. The result can be the dreaded writer's block.
Most writers, certainly most successful authors, follow a schedule and find that they can do the daily tasks of living, along with a day job, while being committed to their craft in the mornings or evenings or in half-hour segments whenever they become available. Writing, after all, can occur anywhere, at any time.
Some beginning writers assume that, to write, they must stay at home or at their desk full time since successful authors are, presumably, full-time writers. Yet many authors have worked only part-time at their craft, but they have done so regularly.
I think of Anthony Trollope, who produced 47 vast Victorian novels while working full time as a postal inspector in Dublin--a job that he came to enjoy because of the people he came to observe; their gossip and scheming gave him material to build on. Setting a goal of 2,500 words a day, Trollope worked faithfully each morning from 5:30 to 8:30, then went to work.
The type of writing produced may not always have been inspired, but it was a draft that could be revised. Writing doesn't have to be great the first time around; it isn't like brain surgery.
I was reminded the many writers who have other full-time commitments while reading an excellent article online (via the Literary Hub) by a novelist who's also an oncologist, Ray Barfield, M.D. He is one of many people who manage to write as part of an active professional life--because they see that the two worlds are related. It's not a matter of multi-tasking.
Barfield makes some valuable comments about the importance of observation, something he finds that writers and doctors have in common. He says the world of medicine is not made of drugs, equipment, labs, and white coats but of "stories that situate the person, account for the past, impact the future, and offer a sense of what to do next." The good doctor listens and gets to know the patient. He or she is immersed in the drama of human life.
He asks the reader to imagine being in an ER where a man on a gurney is wheeled in, followed by woman carrying a red rose and a sombrero. Whether you are there as a medical professional or visitor, you will inevitably, says Barfield, pay attention to the woman with the rose and sombrero. That's why he says being a writer and being a doctor are so similar: they involve paying attention.
He quotes William Osler: "It's much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than to know which disease the patient has." Interns need to be trained to be curious about the lives of the people they treat; so too writers begin by paying attention to details and end up telling stories about what they see and hear around them.
Writing, then, is not a matter of genius or great talent; it demands many things, including a love of language and certainly an interest in people. And whatever time we can find in our busy lives to record the often amusing, shocking, ironic, or disturbing details of ordinary life might be enough--if we stay committed to the task.
Most writers, certainly most successful authors, follow a schedule and find that they can do the daily tasks of living, along with a day job, while being committed to their craft in the mornings or evenings or in half-hour segments whenever they become available. Writing, after all, can occur anywhere, at any time.
Some beginning writers assume that, to write, they must stay at home or at their desk full time since successful authors are, presumably, full-time writers. Yet many authors have worked only part-time at their craft, but they have done so regularly.
I think of Anthony Trollope, who produced 47 vast Victorian novels while working full time as a postal inspector in Dublin--a job that he came to enjoy because of the people he came to observe; their gossip and scheming gave him material to build on. Setting a goal of 2,500 words a day, Trollope worked faithfully each morning from 5:30 to 8:30, then went to work.
The type of writing produced may not always have been inspired, but it was a draft that could be revised. Writing doesn't have to be great the first time around; it isn't like brain surgery.
I was reminded the many writers who have other full-time commitments while reading an excellent article online (via the Literary Hub) by a novelist who's also an oncologist, Ray Barfield, M.D. He is one of many people who manage to write as part of an active professional life--because they see that the two worlds are related. It's not a matter of multi-tasking.
Barfield makes some valuable comments about the importance of observation, something he finds that writers and doctors have in common. He says the world of medicine is not made of drugs, equipment, labs, and white coats but of "stories that situate the person, account for the past, impact the future, and offer a sense of what to do next." The good doctor listens and gets to know the patient. He or she is immersed in the drama of human life.
He asks the reader to imagine being in an ER where a man on a gurney is wheeled in, followed by woman carrying a red rose and a sombrero. Whether you are there as a medical professional or visitor, you will inevitably, says Barfield, pay attention to the woman with the rose and sombrero. That's why he says being a writer and being a doctor are so similar: they involve paying attention.
He quotes William Osler: "It's much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than to know which disease the patient has." Interns need to be trained to be curious about the lives of the people they treat; so too writers begin by paying attention to details and end up telling stories about what they see and hear around them.
Writing, then, is not a matter of genius or great talent; it demands many things, including a love of language and certainly an interest in people. And whatever time we can find in our busy lives to record the often amusing, shocking, ironic, or disturbing details of ordinary life might be enough--if we stay committed to the task.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Parenting and Writing
I've been reading about the 4th volume of a series of books by a writer from Norway, Karl Knausgaard, called The Struggle. His struggle is to find time, as a stay-at-home dad busy with three young children, to get writing done amid the endless chores that make up parenting.
His solution: after some frustration at having no time to write, along with a desire to get as close as possible to life in his writing, he decided to capture the daily flow of life as it happens, in all its details. The result, so far, is an autobiography of 3,600 pages.
He says in an interview that the children might take time from his writing, but they also open up time for him, allowing him a new sense of time as felt by kids. Children live in a moment-to-moment kind of ordinary, uneventful time basic to family intimacy. Adults who write rarely tap into this.
And so, he has discovered the material, often tedious perhaps to recount and read, provided by describing cooking meals, cleaning up, reading stories, and all the rest. In the process he says he re-examines his own childhood memories, which are so limited in comparison with the immense amount of time he now spends with his children. And this leads to questions about memory: how can I know that the particular events from childhood I remember now were decisive in making me who I am and not all the others of which I remember nothing?
How does a writer sort out the noteworthy from the ordinary in everyday life? That is always a question for the writer of fiction, memoir and autobiography: what to include, what to exclude. And, of course, how to find time to think and write, apart from the busy-ness of duties. Knausgaard seems to have found a solution to such questions that works for him.
Although he may end up boring the reader, Knausgaard keeps himself faithful to the child's perspective, in which every little event is of great interest and the focus of attention. Yet, in what I have read of his books and the interview, I see no reference to his concern about the reader. Is he not concerned about conveying something interesting to readers, something they will want to learn more about, or does he just assume that realistic/naturalistic fiction is, like certain documentary films that unfold in real time, interesting merely because of its ordinary details?
I brought up this topic of the role of the reader in my post of April 7: "Why Write?" At issue was the author of a diary turned into a journal that seemed to avoid the key issue of communication. Any topic can be made interesting by its style and selection of details, yet I worry about anything written to be published that doesn't concern itself about being interesting to someone other than the author.
If Knausgaard raises issues of childhood time and memory, as he did in the interview I read, if he goes beyond the mundane details of cooking dinner, his 3,600-page opus may prove to be worth the reader's time.
My source for this post is the article by Elaine Blair in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. I found the review-article fascinating, but I doubt if I'll ever be motivated to read any of the four volumes of Mr. Knausgaard's experiment with real-time narrative.
His solution: after some frustration at having no time to write, along with a desire to get as close as possible to life in his writing, he decided to capture the daily flow of life as it happens, in all its details. The result, so far, is an autobiography of 3,600 pages.
He says in an interview that the children might take time from his writing, but they also open up time for him, allowing him a new sense of time as felt by kids. Children live in a moment-to-moment kind of ordinary, uneventful time basic to family intimacy. Adults who write rarely tap into this.
And so, he has discovered the material, often tedious perhaps to recount and read, provided by describing cooking meals, cleaning up, reading stories, and all the rest. In the process he says he re-examines his own childhood memories, which are so limited in comparison with the immense amount of time he now spends with his children. And this leads to questions about memory: how can I know that the particular events from childhood I remember now were decisive in making me who I am and not all the others of which I remember nothing?
How does a writer sort out the noteworthy from the ordinary in everyday life? That is always a question for the writer of fiction, memoir and autobiography: what to include, what to exclude. And, of course, how to find time to think and write, apart from the busy-ness of duties. Knausgaard seems to have found a solution to such questions that works for him.
Although he may end up boring the reader, Knausgaard keeps himself faithful to the child's perspective, in which every little event is of great interest and the focus of attention. Yet, in what I have read of his books and the interview, I see no reference to his concern about the reader. Is he not concerned about conveying something interesting to readers, something they will want to learn more about, or does he just assume that realistic/naturalistic fiction is, like certain documentary films that unfold in real time, interesting merely because of its ordinary details?
I brought up this topic of the role of the reader in my post of April 7: "Why Write?" At issue was the author of a diary turned into a journal that seemed to avoid the key issue of communication. Any topic can be made interesting by its style and selection of details, yet I worry about anything written to be published that doesn't concern itself about being interesting to someone other than the author.
If Knausgaard raises issues of childhood time and memory, as he did in the interview I read, if he goes beyond the mundane details of cooking dinner, his 3,600-page opus may prove to be worth the reader's time.
My source for this post is the article by Elaine Blair in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. I found the review-article fascinating, but I doubt if I'll ever be motivated to read any of the four volumes of Mr. Knausgaard's experiment with real-time narrative.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
The Problem with Work
Americans are known for over-working. We have created a consumer society that promotes products people feel they must have to satisfy their quest for happiness, thus leading to debt. Other costs, such a health care and college tuition, prompt too many people to undertake more than one job to pay for the cars, the insurance, and everything else needed to keep up with life in the 21st century.
Compounding the problem today is the proliferation of digital technology that allows many employees to be on call all the time, anywhere. Everyone has a smartphone or similar device attached to his or her body at all times, making stress a constant and making the workplace demoralizing and demanding.
How can we slow down? How can we find a balance between work and living so we are not burned out?
Sidney Callahan in the recent America magazine notes this problem and suggests that monastic detachment may be an answer. She cites the Rule of St. Benedict, which since the 6th century has governed life in Western monasteries and serves as the model for contemplative prayer today. It is also analogous to the practices of yoga and mindfulness that have become popular.
For the Benedictine tradition, work is valued "without overvaluing and over self-investing in achievement as the measure of identity," she writes. In the monastery, time for work and study, recreation and hospitality, is limited and secondary to the spiritual life, the "work of God." As a result, work is important but less important than prayer. It is impossible in such a world for status, money or power to become a goal, as it is in the lives of most people.
The key lesson from the monastic tradition is that "who I am is always more important than what I do."
What a contradiction to today's culture, where what we do (or want to do or used to do) often defines who we are and how we think.
I don't know how the goal of monastic detachment advocated by Callahan can be implemented in the workplace, though I have read that some innovative outfits like Google have developed innovative, flexible schedules where employees can take long breaks for exercise and meditation on the campus where they work.
For most people, however, finding a balance between activity and leisure, with time for creativity and the spirit to flourish while earning enough to pay the bills, is a daunting challenge. But I believe we are creative enough to find solutions before we destroy ourselves.
Compounding the problem today is the proliferation of digital technology that allows many employees to be on call all the time, anywhere. Everyone has a smartphone or similar device attached to his or her body at all times, making stress a constant and making the workplace demoralizing and demanding.
How can we slow down? How can we find a balance between work and living so we are not burned out?
Sidney Callahan in the recent America magazine notes this problem and suggests that monastic detachment may be an answer. She cites the Rule of St. Benedict, which since the 6th century has governed life in Western monasteries and serves as the model for contemplative prayer today. It is also analogous to the practices of yoga and mindfulness that have become popular.
For the Benedictine tradition, work is valued "without overvaluing and over self-investing in achievement as the measure of identity," she writes. In the monastery, time for work and study, recreation and hospitality, is limited and secondary to the spiritual life, the "work of God." As a result, work is important but less important than prayer. It is impossible in such a world for status, money or power to become a goal, as it is in the lives of most people.
The key lesson from the monastic tradition is that "who I am is always more important than what I do."
What a contradiction to today's culture, where what we do (or want to do or used to do) often defines who we are and how we think.
I don't know how the goal of monastic detachment advocated by Callahan can be implemented in the workplace, though I have read that some innovative outfits like Google have developed innovative, flexible schedules where employees can take long breaks for exercise and meditation on the campus where they work.
For most people, however, finding a balance between activity and leisure, with time for creativity and the spirit to flourish while earning enough to pay the bills, is a daunting challenge. But I believe we are creative enough to find solutions before we destroy ourselves.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Fast and Furious: A reflection on time
Has any period in history felt that it has less time than ours? That is one of the many significant questions raised in an article by the editors of the journal n+1. It's called "Too Fast, Too Furious."
The great paradox of the modern age (the past 200 years or so) is that, with the development of technology, time is felt as passing more and more quickly. This is what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls an "acceleration society." Why do labor-saving devices that give us more free time also bring feelings of stress and lack of time?
The answer seems obvious: "The number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large and expands every day with implacable speed," Rosa says. The more "free" time we have, the more busy and enslaved to time we become. No wonder Thoreau remains enduringly popular.
At no time of year, when consumerism is in high gear, does this feeling tend of being overwhelmed by time become more apparent than the present holiday season, which involves doing innumerable things. One important point missing from the n+1 article is our ability to resist doing more things, by choosing to slow down, by not filling up leisure time with more and more apps, tweets, and other devices and gadgets and finding a space for silence.
In other words, it is certainly possible to be, as the article suggests, overly busy and stressed doing many things and feeling, like Tantalus, never satisfied, either intellectually or emotionally. But is it inevitable that we are trapped in this way?
Rosa speaks of a "frenetic standstill" in which "an eternal, unchanging sameness afflicts the age." Yet, with a minimum of imagination and training, one can enter the timeless present, which does not mean bleak affliction (as Rosa suggests) but a sense of constant presence beyond the rush of time. Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, or other, offers a way out of the dilemma Rosa sees as trapping us in an endless cycle of busyness.
Finding time for ourselves, for meditation and reflection, even for quiet reading, requires hard choices (turn off the media, avoid the telephone for a few hours) but seems essential for our inner life. We can find moments of transcendent stillness and peace in which we are connected to the timeless reality of God.
The advice of Teilhard de Chardin is relevant: allow God "the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." Begin, that is, with the recognition that all life on earth is incomplete, that we are restless creatures, and that progress is any area take a very long time. But the goal is ultimately reached, if we "trust in the slow work of God."
There is, in the end, enough time. And if we make time for the timeless presence of God within us, we can, however briefly, step outside the mad rush of time and find the peace we all seek. That, at least, is my hope at this time of Christmas.
The great paradox of the modern age (the past 200 years or so) is that, with the development of technology, time is felt as passing more and more quickly. This is what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls an "acceleration society." Why do labor-saving devices that give us more free time also bring feelings of stress and lack of time?
The answer seems obvious: "The number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large and expands every day with implacable speed," Rosa says. The more "free" time we have, the more busy and enslaved to time we become. No wonder Thoreau remains enduringly popular.
At no time of year, when consumerism is in high gear, does this feeling tend of being overwhelmed by time become more apparent than the present holiday season, which involves doing innumerable things. One important point missing from the n+1 article is our ability to resist doing more things, by choosing to slow down, by not filling up leisure time with more and more apps, tweets, and other devices and gadgets and finding a space for silence.
In other words, it is certainly possible to be, as the article suggests, overly busy and stressed doing many things and feeling, like Tantalus, never satisfied, either intellectually or emotionally. But is it inevitable that we are trapped in this way?
Rosa speaks of a "frenetic standstill" in which "an eternal, unchanging sameness afflicts the age." Yet, with a minimum of imagination and training, one can enter the timeless present, which does not mean bleak affliction (as Rosa suggests) but a sense of constant presence beyond the rush of time. Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, or other, offers a way out of the dilemma Rosa sees as trapping us in an endless cycle of busyness.
Finding time for ourselves, for meditation and reflection, even for quiet reading, requires hard choices (turn off the media, avoid the telephone for a few hours) but seems essential for our inner life. We can find moments of transcendent stillness and peace in which we are connected to the timeless reality of God.
The advice of Teilhard de Chardin is relevant: allow God "the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." Begin, that is, with the recognition that all life on earth is incomplete, that we are restless creatures, and that progress is any area take a very long time. But the goal is ultimately reached, if we "trust in the slow work of God."
There is, in the end, enough time. And if we make time for the timeless presence of God within us, we can, however briefly, step outside the mad rush of time and find the peace we all seek. That, at least, is my hope at this time of Christmas.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Understanding the Dead
The Day of the Dead, or All Souls' Day in my tradition, has always had great resonance for me. It reminds me of my connection with that undiscovered realm beyond the natural world and also with remembering, which sometimes means re-membering.
Some years ago I read a book by Frederick Buechner, an eloquent spiritual writer. In it he says that memory is more than a nostalgic look back at a time past. It is, he says, "a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and to change with the life that is in it still."
The implications of this powerful statement is that, in remembering and re-connecting with deceased loved ones in our families and with favorite authors and saints, we come to understand the dead in new ways; perhaps they come to understand us, and through them we come to understand ourselves.
This sounds mysterious because it is, because time and the timeless are mysteriously connected, as great art can sometimes remind us. I am reminded of my own last post, with that statement by Faulkner about the past as ever-present. I tend to apply this to prayer, which bridges the gap between the two realms. Today especially I join with others still living as we pray for the dead, not as they were on earth merely, but as they are now--and for ourselves and what we might become.
Some years ago I read a book by Frederick Buechner, an eloquent spiritual writer. In it he says that memory is more than a nostalgic look back at a time past. It is, he says, "a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and to change with the life that is in it still."
The implications of this powerful statement is that, in remembering and re-connecting with deceased loved ones in our families and with favorite authors and saints, we come to understand the dead in new ways; perhaps they come to understand us, and through them we come to understand ourselves.
This sounds mysterious because it is, because time and the timeless are mysteriously connected, as great art can sometimes remind us. I am reminded of my own last post, with that statement by Faulkner about the past as ever-present. I tend to apply this to prayer, which bridges the gap between the two realms. Today especially I join with others still living as we pray for the dead, not as they were on earth merely, but as they are now--and for ourselves and what we might become.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
How Past is the Past?
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner famously wrote. "It's not even past."
You don't have to know anything about Faulkner's fiction, steeped in the history of the American South, or about T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," to appreciate the presence of the past in and around us.* What is true of writing and language, where our most innovative fiction is determined by literary precedents going back many centuries, is more concretely evident from the perspective of science.
Some of this was brought home in a memorable documentary from Chile, "Nostalgia for the Light," by Patricio Guzman, who is concerned with two discrete but related activities in the Atacama Desert: archeologists and concerned relatives searching for human remains while astronomers using this unique, humid-free lunar-like landscape to study distant stars.
The result is not always as coherent or clear as it might be, but this film about remembering is totally original and provocative. I recommend it--despite subtitles that should be yellow instead of white for greater legibility.
Not only are people looking for pre-Columbian artifacts in the Chilean desert, but women, whose men disappeared during the 1973 regime of Pinochet search--seemingly in vain--for shards of their bones. They gain some comfort from the presence of astronomers, who are able to put the pain of loss in the cosmic context of the life cycle: the calcium in our bones was there from the beginning, from the Big Bang; and we learn, too, that the same calcium the stars are made of is in us--and of course in the bones being dug up by the grieving women.
The astronomers are searching for the ultimate past, the origin of the universe. And their search finds a perfect home in this desert, where the women and others are searching for the more immediate past, whose energy in terms of light years affects all life on earth.
(If only Shakespeare knew this he could have written: "we are such stuff as stars are made on.")
What emerges in this film is a meditation on time and the unity of creation. The present, we are reminded,is only a construct of the mind; the mind gives us the only absolute present we know. Even the image we see now before us is delayed by the speed of light reaching the earth and so we live "behind the times."
If all this sounds confusing, it can be, but I am grateful that Guzman has made this important film. It reminds me of the impossibility of separating the past from the present, or from the future, which is just the past getting younger (as my wife, Lynn, likes to say).
*I cited Eliot's essay because I remembered him making a memorable remark about culture in the "bones," and this is now, thanks to Guzman's film, apparent to me on the genetic level: The poet must live in the "present moment of the past" and write "not merely with his own generation in his bones but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe" is present, in a historical sense, whereby the "timeless and the temporal" together make a writer traditional. (I never thought I could capture the main idea that essay in one sentence, if I have.)
You don't have to know anything about Faulkner's fiction, steeped in the history of the American South, or about T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," to appreciate the presence of the past in and around us.* What is true of writing and language, where our most innovative fiction is determined by literary precedents going back many centuries, is more concretely evident from the perspective of science.
Some of this was brought home in a memorable documentary from Chile, "Nostalgia for the Light," by Patricio Guzman, who is concerned with two discrete but related activities in the Atacama Desert: archeologists and concerned relatives searching for human remains while astronomers using this unique, humid-free lunar-like landscape to study distant stars.
The result is not always as coherent or clear as it might be, but this film about remembering is totally original and provocative. I recommend it--despite subtitles that should be yellow instead of white for greater legibility.
Not only are people looking for pre-Columbian artifacts in the Chilean desert, but women, whose men disappeared during the 1973 regime of Pinochet search--seemingly in vain--for shards of their bones. They gain some comfort from the presence of astronomers, who are able to put the pain of loss in the cosmic context of the life cycle: the calcium in our bones was there from the beginning, from the Big Bang; and we learn, too, that the same calcium the stars are made of is in us--and of course in the bones being dug up by the grieving women.
The astronomers are searching for the ultimate past, the origin of the universe. And their search finds a perfect home in this desert, where the women and others are searching for the more immediate past, whose energy in terms of light years affects all life on earth.
(If only Shakespeare knew this he could have written: "we are such stuff as stars are made on.")
What emerges in this film is a meditation on time and the unity of creation. The present, we are reminded,is only a construct of the mind; the mind gives us the only absolute present we know. Even the image we see now before us is delayed by the speed of light reaching the earth and so we live "behind the times."
If all this sounds confusing, it can be, but I am grateful that Guzman has made this important film. It reminds me of the impossibility of separating the past from the present, or from the future, which is just the past getting younger (as my wife, Lynn, likes to say).
*I cited Eliot's essay because I remembered him making a memorable remark about culture in the "bones," and this is now, thanks to Guzman's film, apparent to me on the genetic level: The poet must live in the "present moment of the past" and write "not merely with his own generation in his bones but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe" is present, in a historical sense, whereby the "timeless and the temporal" together make a writer traditional. (I never thought I could capture the main idea that essay in one sentence, if I have.)
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